Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 5, 1995 TAG: 9501070079
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
These leaders are quick to disassociate themselves from those who perpetrate or defend the killings as ``justifiable homicide'' in that the aim is to snuff out the lives of those who aid and abet the snuffing out of unborn babies' lives.
It is not enough, though, for anti-abortion leaders to raise their voices after such killings to urge ``For God's sake, stop the violence.'' Not enough for the moderates to plead helplessness and to distance themselves from those they label as fanatics operating outside the anti-abortion mainstream.
Not when anti-abortion groups persist in equating abortion with murder or even the Holocaust, thus in effect inciting violent zeal.
On New Year's Eve, the day after the abortion-clinic killings in Massachusetts, the message on the National Pro-Life Newsline depicted abortion clinics as a world of death camps, contract killings and mass murder. How many hearing that message might - like Paul Hill, the former minister convicted of killing an abortion doctor in Florida, or John Salvi III, charged with the Boston slayings - become convinced that killing anyone within bullet's reach at an abortion clinic is the morally right course?
To be sure, the rhetoric on the other side of the abortion issue is not always temperate. It is often marked by contempt for those who partially or fully disagree with abortion-rights views, not to mention contempt for the possibility that the fetus is a human life deserving some protection or rights.
Some abortion-rights proponents' conviction that the Supreme Court has permanently granted them the moral high ground, that further debate should cease and desist, also comes across to many as self-righteous, even smug.
Those on either side and in the ambivalent middle have, of course, a constitutional right to vividly express their views - to debate, to protest, to argue for their beliefs ad infinitum. But no one has the right to murder and maim as an expression of opinion.
The clinic killings ought to encourage anti-abortion groups to reconsider whether there is any meaningful distinction between abortions and, say, slaughtering one-year-olds - whether abortion can be opposed without equating the two activities.
For if there is no difference, then the terrible leap in logic to justify killing abortion-clinic personnel is not all that incomprehensible, notwithstanding the protested regrets of the respectable, non-violent anti-abortion activists.
Nor is resort to this logic likely to remain isolated. If you believe millions of babies are being murdered in a continuing American holocaust, the killing of a few people associated with the organized extermination will seem, at the least, less outrageous in comparison, and possibly heroic. They may also be regarded as effective, if they reduce the number of people willing to provide abortions.
That latter point is worth noting because the rising harassment and violence threaten not only clinic personnel, but women's constitutional right to have abortions. Leaving aside the procedure's morality or immorality, the issue that needs settling now is whether our nation is going to respect the rule of law or run amok with unbridled terrorism, provoked and carried out in a blasphemy of religious righteousness.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB